Big Bird remark ruffles feathers

By René A. Guzman :
October 4, 2012

Big Bird all but locked up the sympathy vote during Wednesday night's presidential debate after Mitt Romney said he loves the “Sesame Street” character but would cut funding to PBS.

The remark launched a flock of tweets (an applicable term if there ever was one), up to 17,000 a minute. Twitter parody accounts and Big Bird spoof photos popped up online, such as one of him holding a “Will Work for Food” sign.

“Everybody's talking about it now,” said Elayne Rapping, a pop culture expert and professor emeritus of American studies at the University at Buffalo. “When you mention something like Big Bird, everybody has an interest in it.”

Rapping said Romney's remark was in line with the conservative view that government should not fund the arts. Proponents support subsidizing a service like PBS because of its educational content.

“So it comes up a lot as kind of the flashpoint where the issue of cutting government spending comes up,” she said.

PBS issued a statement Thursday expressing disappointment that it became a political target in the presidential debate.

“Gov. Romney does not understand the value the American people place on public broadcasting and the outstanding return on investments the system delivers to our nation,” the statement said.

PBS said federal investment in public broadcasting equals about 0.01 percent of the federal budget, or about $1.35 per American per year PBS said cutting it “would have virtually no impact on the nation's debt. Yet the loss to the American public would be devastating.”

San Antonio PBS affiliate KLRN-TV receives 15 percent of its budget — almost $1 million a year — from the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The rest comes from donations, memberships, sponsorships, underwriting and grants.

New KLRN President and CEO Mario Vazquez said he's glad Romney made the PBS remark because it raises awareness of public broadcasting and its value to Americans.

“If we lose the funding it will affect us, but we'll still stay on the air,” Vazquez said. “But we're hoping the community will step up to the plate and help us recover that gap.”

Rapping said “Sesame Street” and other PBS shows would survive as commercial programs but would then be subject to the marketplace and corporate advertising, which she says is often not the best thing for children to see.

Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit/nonpartisan educational organization behind “Sesame Street,” said in a statement Thursday, “We do not comment on political campaigns, but we're happy we can all agree that everyone likes Big Bird.”

“I think the beautiful thing is that Big Bird will not have to work for food,” Vazquez said.